Page 2 of Maybe in Another Life

I shrug, because it’s an impulse. It’s always my impulse to ignore the bad, to run toward the good.

But I’m also not feeling great about my own impulses at the moment. I’m not sure they are getting me where I want to go.

I stop shrugging.

And then, because I won’t see her again after this flight, I take it one step further. I tell her something I’ve only recently told myself. “Sometimes I worry I’ll never find a place to call home.”

She puts her hand on mine, ever so briefly. “You will,” she says. “You’re young still. You have plenty of time.”

I wonder if she can tell that I’m twenty-nine and considers that young, or if she thinks I’m younger than I am.

“Thanks,” I say. I take my headphones out of my bag and put them on.

“At the end of the flight, during the five tricky minutes when we land, maybe we can talk about my lack of career choices,” I say, laughing. “That will definitely distract you.”

She smiles broadly and lets out a laugh. “I’d consider it a personal favor.”

When I come out of the gate, Gabby is holding up a sign that says “Hannah Marie Martin,” as if I wouldn’t recognize her, as if I wouldn’t know she was my ride.

I run toward her, and as I get closer, I can see that she has drawn a picture of me next to my name. It is a crude sketch but not altogether terrible. The Hannah of her drawing has big eyes and long lashes, a tiny nose, and a line for a mouth. On the top of my head is hair drawn dramatically in a high bun. The only thing of note drawn on my stick-figure body is an oversized pair of boobs.

It’s not necessarily how I see myself, but I admit, if you reduced me to a caricature, I’d be big boobs and a high bun. Sort of like how Mickey Mouse is round ears and gloved hands or how Michael Jackson is white socks and black loafers.

I’d much rather be depicted with my dark brown hair and my light green eyes, but I understand that you can’t really do much with color when you’re drawing with a Bic pen.

Even though I haven’t visited Gabby in person since her wedding day two years ago, I have seen her every Sunday morning of the recent past. We video-chat no matter what we have to do that day or how hungover one of us is feeling. It is, in some ways, the most reliable thing in my life.

Gabby is tiny and twiglike. Her hair is kept cropped close in a bob, and there’s no extra fat on her, not an inch to spare. When I hug her, I remember how odd it is to hug someone so much smaller than I am, how different the two of us seem at first glance. I am tall, curvy, and white. She is short, thin, and black.

She doesn’t have any makeup on, and yet she is one of the prettiest women here. I don’t tell her that, because I know what she’d say. She’d say that’s irrelevant. She’d say we shouldn’t be complimenting each other on our looks or competing with each other over who is prettier. She’s got a point, so I keep it to myself.

I have known Gabby since we were both fourteen years old. We sat next to each other in earth science class the first day of high school. The friendship was fast and everlasting. We were Gabby and Hannah, Hannah and Gabby, one name rarely mentioned without the other in tow.

I moved in with her and her parents, Carl and Tina, when my family left for London. Carl and Tina treated me as if I were their own. They coached me through applying for schools, made sure I did my homework, and kept me on a curfew. Carl routinely tried to persuade me to become a doctor, like him and his father. By then, he knew that Gabby wouldn’t follow on his path. She already knew she wanted to work in public service. I think Carl figured I was his last shot. But Tina instead encouraged me to find my own way. Unfortunately, I’m still not sure what that way is. But back then, I just assumed it would all fall into place, that the big things in life would take care of themselves.

After we went off to college, Gabby in Chicago, myself in Boston, we still talked all the time but started to find new lives for ourselves. Freshman year, she became friends with another black student at her school named Vanessa. Gabby would tell me about their trips to the nearby mall and the parties they went to. I’d have been lying if I said I wasn’t nervous back then, in some small way, that Vanessa would become closer to Gabby than I ever could, that Vanessa could share something with Gabby that I was not a part of.

I asked Gabby about it over the phone once. I was lying in my dorm room on my twin XL bed, the phone sweaty and hot on my ear from our already-hours-long conversation.

“Do you feel like Vanessa understands you better than I do?” I asked her. “Because you’re both black?” The minute the question came out of my mouth, I was embarrassed. It had seemed reasonable in my head but sounded irrational coming out of my mouth. If words were things, I would have rushed to pluck them out of the air and put them back in my mouth.

Gabby laughed at me. “Do you think white people understand you more than I do just because they’re white?”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

“So be quiet,” Gabby said.

And I did. If there is one thing I love about Gabby, it is that she has always known when I should be quiet. She is, in fact, the only person who often proves to know me better than I know myself.

“Let me guess,” she says now, as she takes my carry-on bag out of my hand, a gentlemanly gesture. “We’re going to need to rent one of those baggage carts to get all of your stuff.”

I laugh. “In my defense, I am moving across the country,” I say.

I long ago stopped buying furniture or large items. I tend to sublet furnished apartments. You learn after one or two moves that buying an IKEA bed, putting it together, and then breaking it down and selling it for fifty bucks six months later is a waste of time and money. But I do still havethings, some of which have survived multiple cross-country trips. It would feel callous to let go of them now.

“I’m going to guess there’s at least four bottles of Orange Ginger body lotion in here,” Gabby says as she grabs one of my bags off the carousel.

I shake my head. “Only the one. I’m running low.”

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